Lily Phillips and the Spreadsheet Egregore

There is more than one way of being possessed

It’s not fashionable these days to talk about a man “possessing” a woman in the context of a sexual encounter. But I was reminded of that word - possession - in the context of the now-notorious stunt by OnlyFans pornographer Lily Phillips, in which she had sex with 100 men in 24 hours.

Afterwards, in an interview, she broke down in tears. “I don’t know that I’d recommend it,” she said in the viral Josh Pieters documentary that captured the story. But reportedly she’s going back for more, too: next time the aim is 1000. This has all has excited much comment, mostly concerning sexual liberalism, women, porn, and consent. Should we feel sympathy for her tearful condition, given that she chose to do this? Maybe; but I think not, or not precisely, because she consented to something she later regretted. I think something more uncanny is going on.

What Phillips seemed most distressed about, in the documentary, wasn’t the gangbang as such. It was firstly the dynamic of internet audience capture: she described in her interview how, once she’d promised the event to her OnlyFans followers she had to go through with it: as she spoke about this her voice caught, as though experiencing that sense of compulsion all over again. “When you’ve promised something to people who support you, it’s kind of hard to [her voice breaks a little] let them down.”

And secondly, it was how the stunt didn’t just leave her feeling “robotic” and “dissociating” - it also depersonalised the men who participated. She reports only being able to remember 5 or 10 of them as individuals. And she described, again with a catch in her voice, how some of the men who participated complained they had had only three minutes with her when the email promised five - and “feeling pressure to make them come when you haven’t spent enough time with them”. Particularly painful was, she said, “conversing with them, and they’d be like we’ve only had two minutes, three minutes, and you said five on the message”.

That is: the act these men were invited to perform with her, or in her, or on her wasn’t “possession” in the sense of transports of erotic surrender leading to greater intimacy, of the kind explored (for example) by Marilyn Simon here - or even of Phillips’ objectification within an economy of male-centred sex-as-commerce. There was even less intimacy on offer than the men wanted: it was Phillips who refused the male participants’ pleas for interpersonal connection, so as to reduce them with maximum efficiency to numbers for her internet stunt.

There’s plenty one could say about all this from a feminist perspective, especially within the overall economy of buying and selling sex and how this maps onto larger patterns of violence and desire. But I want to reflect a bit on who - or rather what - was actually encountered, or possessed, or doing the possessing.

One common refrain in the debate over Phillips’ stunt has been that she, an individual, chose to do this and so is wholly responsible for her own suffering, if indeed she is suffering. But my sense is that even if she did “consent” to this event, in a sense, she also experienced a sense of compulsion, arising through the relation between herself as an OnlyFans performer, and the aggregate wishes of her fans. The conventional term for this is “audience capture”, and it’s a real phenomenon, that’s radically intensified by the directness of relationship between a digital creator and their audience.

The more immediate and dopamine-laden the relation between a content creator and his or her audience, the more intense the temptation to be shaped by - to be, as it were created as content - by that audience. There’s nothing woo-woo about this: it’s a social dynamic that emerges in the dialectic between someone who enjoys creating, and the implied/assumed/actual audience for their work. Every writer will tell you they have an intuitive mental picture of their implied audience; the difference online is that the feedback you get is so immediate (and, in the subscription age, often pecuniary) as to whether what you’re doing works or not. So that relationship can get very intense, very quickly.

But a more woo-woo term for complete audience capture (I’m sure you can think of examples) might be egregoric possession. I’ve touched on the concept of “egregores” before: it’s a concept that comes out of occult theory, that describes collective entities arising from (or perhaps perceived by) multiple human consciousnesses. The key point is multiplicity: the intuition that a swarm or composite awareness can have agency of a kind, even if this is difficult to parse from the individualistic, human perspective.

Anyone who spends a lot of time online will be familiar with the sense of witnessing a collective hive-mind in action. I linked this recently with a phenomenon of widespread re-enchantment, in which re-attunement to pattern recognition via digital reading has meshed with post-atomic physics to re-open cultural space for the uncanny. And while you can think perfectly well about egregores without agreeing with any of the above, or indeed without opening any old books, it’s also true that many longstanding traditions already exist for understanding egregores - including Christianity. For example we might recall the passage in the Gospel of Mark that describes Jesus casting out multiple demons possessing a man in terms that plausibly map onto what I’m calling egregoric desire: “My name is Legion”, says this collective, “because there are many of us inside this man.”

Many of those now exploring such ideas are ambivalent on the ontology of these non-material realities. But perhaps, if we want to be able to make sense of our moral intuitions concerning a phenomenon such as Lily Phillips, we should consider not re-inventing the wheel. Bluntly: I want to consider the possibility that Phillips’ stunt is more intelligible understood not in terms of liberal feminism or the sexual revolution or whatever, but as an instance of what we might describe as egregoric capture, and the medievals would have called demonic possession.

It’s not just the indescribable look in Phillips’ eyes in the aftermath of the stunt. The signposts are subtle, but I don’t think I’m imagining the possibility that the documentary-maker Josh Pieters hasn’t ruled this possibility out either, not least in the clip he posts from an interview another OnlyFans creator, Alex le Tissier, who describes the slippery slope of extreme content as “like doing a deal with the Devil”.

Just recently, too, the author of one of the re-enchantment books I discussed recently, Rod Dreher, also wrote about such deals. Dreher was reviewing a recent book by Father Carlos Martins, on his experience as a Catholic exorcist - in which, per Dreher, Martins describes how entities of this kind (egregores) are intensely legalistic. Once you “consent” to their presence, he says, you’re stuck with them - even if you later regret it and want them gone:

Demons live and breathe legalism. As long as the demon enjoys the legal right to possess, he is not required to leave because he is inside a dwelling that is his.

So let’s say for a moment someone might find themselves egregorically occupied. What might have precipitated such consent? According to Fr. Martins, among many other possible causes, trauma can be a precipitating factor in attracting demonic interest. (This strikes me as unfair, but also intuitively plausible.) Now, Phillips was, by her own account, highly promiscuous long before she started an OnlyFans: a level of hypersexuality that looks, to my normie perspective, a lot like the compulsive sexual behaviour frequently linked to trauma. And perhaps I’m over-reading, but during the documentary Phillips told Josh Pieters that early in her life she had wanted to wait until marriage before having sex, and believed the act was special. Then, she says, after first having sex “I realised it wasn’t special”. What happened in that encounter? She doesn’t say. But it was after that, she says, that she “just realised I loved it”.

So we could just say that something about Lily Phillips’ first sexual experience left her compulsively hypersexual, which in turn led her into the adult content industry and thence to a level of audience capture that incentivised dissociative escalation and extreme stunts. Or we could say the same, but using the language of egregoric desire, or indeed demonic possession. We’d be describing broadly the same phenomena.

Suppose egregores are sufficiently real to merit discussion. Are such entities agentic and sentient? I’ll save that for another post; it’s a question that makes sense within an idealist paradigm, but that statement on its own probably needs more explanation than space allows here. So I hope that “no, but also yes” will suffice for now. The pull of audience capture, though, is real: believe me, I feel its pressure daily. And the power of a really big egregore is difficult to overstate. Just think about the one that swept over the West at the beginning of the pandemic. And whether or not you embrace the full-fat Catholic-coded “demons” frame or the more understated and much more online “egregore” one, it’s my view that some form of the “also yes” reality of egregoric possession is close to the core of what’s going on with Lily Phillips.

This would also explain why, despite seeming deeply saddened by the experience, she is now proposing to do it again, this time with ten times as many men. And perhaps this also helps explain why her stunt has been so viral. In the Pieters documentary there’s a short sequence where Phillips shows the spreadsheet in which she tracks her OnlyFans work. But it’s not just her, or other successful OnlyFans “creators”, who are fixated on trying to tabulate, quantify, and commodify even the most embodied, relational, intimate and subjective aspects of human life. From betting markets based on biohacker Bryan Johnson’s publicly published nocturnal erection data, to “body count” discourse as a proxy for romanticism, what Rene Guenon called the “reign of quantity” is everywhere. And this spreadsheet mentality propagates in turn into our understanding of what a person is, to the point where we can no longer explain why humans should not be treated as fungible work units within the nomos of the airport. The spreadsheet demon is the spirit of the age.

And however or whenever Phillips did agree, what she seems to have consented to was not sex precisely but possession by this spirit: one that, in turn, she transferred to the male participants whether they wanted her to or not. And the online virality of the ritual she enacted - in a form I think Kale Zelden was right to call a deathwork - serves in turn to feed its egregoric power. Perhaps for those of us who recoil from the implications of such a ritual, the right response should not be denouncing the individuals involved. Rather, it should be willingness to take seriously the possibility that Legion still walks the earth, and we were looking right at it the whole time.